Praxis Artspace. 25 Jul 2024
This challenging exhibition at Praxis Artspace, entitled Materiality, features the work of 14 artists who consider the idea of materiality in relation to the human form from widely varying viewpoints.
The exhibition featured an opening address by the internationally renowned performance artist, Stelarc, and the exhibition includes a video of his body being moved about by a huge robotic arm of the kind that might be found in a car factory. Over many years, Stelarc has experimented with devices that enable others to control his movements through prosthetic limbs, and in his catalogue essay, he writes:
“At the time when the individual body is threatened existentially by fatally being infected by biological viruses, the human species is confronted by the more pervasive and invasive ontological risk of infection by its techno-digital artifacts and entities.”
For this exhibition, Annika Gardner and Stelarc jointly produced 12 Muscles (contractions, code, compressed air) which comprises 12 rubber hoses pressurised with air, each 2.5m in length. The hoses periodically contract and expand like human muscles, and their functioning is activated by a pump controlled by an algorithm analogous to a human central nervous system. The hissing of air from the hoses sounds eerily like the exhalation of human breath. Combined with the latest developments in AI and robotics, Stelarc’s oeuvre raises the question of whether the age of the quasi-human being has arrived.
Annika Gardner and Stelarc, 12 Muscles (contractions, code, compressed air),
photo courtesy Praxis Artspace
Stelarc’s interrogation of biomechanical life acts as a conceptual focal point for this diverse and absorbing exhibition. On entry to the Praxis gallery, the viewer is greeted by a pedestrian signal which, activated by a motion sensor, immediately switches from ‘walk’ to ‘don’t walk’ to halt the viewer’s progress, and does so again when the viewer tries to leave. The viewer’s typical reliance on such a signal when crossing a street is disrupted. Entitled Walk Don’t Walk, Marian Sandberg’s reprogrammed signal positions the viewer as an active agent whose movement ironically denies further movement.
Jonny Scholes’s Eye Sample is a collage of images mounted in the manner of a painting, but the collage, which is shown on a screen, continually evolves as it is driven by an algorithm that searches a database of images gathered from the artists’ smart glasses and smartphone and progressively displays what it retrieves. The coded instructions are shown above the imagery, and thus an artwork is being created by an algorithm that mimics those processes of perception, cognition and memory with which we try to make sense of what we see. Scholes’s work shows that the rapidly accelerating capacity of AI algorithms has the potential to supplant our apprehension of the world.
filip custic’s pi(x)el 2/5 is a video showing a nude female figure with screens mounted over gender-defining parts of the face, hands and body. The screens successively display alternate body parts that would redefine the age or gender of the figure, for example, male in place of female genitalia, breasts and so on.
filip custic, pi(x)el 2/5, photo © filip custic_Courtesy of Onkaos
Painter Loren Orsillo has taken a very different approach to the concept of materiality in roughly painting a large section of the gallery wall with highly textured cement. Entitled Fake News, the work offers a brutally dramatic reconsideration of forms such as the mural, the frieze and expressionistic painting, and the act of painting itself. It emphasises the materiality of industrial substances such as cement and our relationship with such materials and with architectural space.
Loren Orsillo, Fake News, photo courtesy Praxis Artspace
Also dwelling on the theme of painting, Brodie Cullen shows two paintings on mattresses, the surfaces of both of which are textured in a manner resembling cyclone fencing. Each mattress’s patterning is incorporated into the concept of the painting, as reflected in the work’s title: Dayscape (heaven through a fence) and Nightscape abstraction (highway through a fence). The materiality of the mattresses is thus incorporated into the imagery, and the boundary between private space, in the form of the bed, and public space, in the form of a fenced area, is dissolved.
Caroline Rothwell’s short video Carbon Emission 5, Constructivist Rococo shows an animated drawing depicting evolving Rococo-style curlicues superimposed over stylised industrial architecture. Rothwell is concerned with environmental pollution, and she draws with a black powdery composite comprised of soot from car exhausts, Philadelphia smokestacks and the 2019 NSW bushfires, thus drawing attention to the environmental impact of industrial processes, vehicle use and wildfires, and emphasising the enduring materiality of those residues.
This wide-ranging and thoughtfully-curated exhibition raises questions about the nature and direction of contemporary human society, especially the extent to which humans will adopt technology that replaces or extends biological or intellectual functioning or recasts identity through body modification. It questions the way in which the body functions privately and publicly, and it questions the interaction of humans with their environment.
Chris Reid
Where: Praxis Artspace
When: 11 Jul to 10 Aug
More Info: praxisartspace.com
Materiality installation view,
L - R: Silphere, glovule;
Bora Murmure, Mermaid portal;
filip custic, pi(x)el 2/5;
Dirk Koy, Shape Study 26
